March 2018

Jan 31, 2012

"I'm sitting this one out," said one weighty downtown booster when I asked about the rush-rush campaign to get a performing arts center on the ballot for November.

I heard the same about another big hitter this afternoon.

They are not alone.

Look, I'm a fan of Matt Brown, and I think the Coliseum is great for this city in more ways than one.

And I think a downtown PAC could be a huge win for Greensboro.

But this mad dash on the PAC is a reckless strategy -- and I don't think voters will just turn around and dump money on the Coliseum if the as-yet-non-existent downtown plan fails.

So that would be a lose-lose.

Why not slow down, allocate some hotel tax money to other projects, let the plan gestate and the economy heal and public support grow, and then build a great new facility?

I'd love to be wrong here -- to see a great plan and private funding and community support all come into focus by springtime. So far, though, it's sound and fury and what seems like a doomed backdoor strategy to build at the Coliseum.

When speaking last week to the GDS seniors about social media and such I began with the Wikipedia blackout and asked them what was up with that.

"SOPA," responded the crowd.

Now, they had just discussed SOPA and the blackout in a class they're all required to take, but both the bill and the revolt against it had their attention. And when I told them that Hollywood was afraid of them, they got that, too.

Which should give pause to any dead-enders in Congress who think Chris Dodd matters more to their future than a bunch of voting-age web adepts.

I'm not convinced that Kay Hagan really gets this yet, so please tell her politely when you have the chance.

And if you want to persuade Internet users to help you innovate solutions for your industry’s many problems, you’ll need to come without your handlers and spin doctors, and without any expectation that your credentials or past accomplishments will carry weight in a serious debate about the costs and benefits of changing the architecture of the Internet to reduce copyright infringement. Come armed with facts, not rhetoric. Bring an open mind. And some engineers.

Oh, and if you’re serious about making real progress, stop calling us nerds.

It's the way earned income gets taxed at a lower rate for one small group than for the rest of the working world.

Mitt Romney is a member of that small group. He didn't want to release his tax returns, because they illustrate the problem. And as far as I can tell, he has no interest in fixing the problem if he's elected, which is one reason this story won't go away.

Trenton Doyle Hancock's show, We Done All We Could And None Of It's Good, opens soon at the Weatherspoon. It includes "new and selected works executed across a wide variety of media, including drawing, painting, collage, and sculpture. The exhibition will also highlight a commissioned wall drawing."

Hancock will speak at a preview party for the exhibition on Friday evening.

Roberta Smith, writing about an earlier TDH show in the New York Times, praised the artist's "sense of unity, economy and for-the-jugular directness."

Of ''The Bad Promise,'' which appears in WDAWCANOIG, she said, "At once tragic and comic, this work makes good on Mr. Hancock's debts to artists like R. Crumb and Philip Guston with a finesse all its own. As much a drawing as a painting, it is an altogether astounding sight."

The money that Mitt Romney made when he was at Bain Capital was compensation for his (apparently excellent) work, but, instead of being taxed as income, it was taxed as a capital gain. It’s a very cozy arrangement.

Jan 29, 2012

Juanita Spalding of Greensboro died last May at 83.

Her brief obit listed no survivors. It said she had worked over the years for a doctor, a phone company, and some insurance companies, and described her as "a passionate advocate of protecting the environment." Commenters at the N&R online version said she was "a joy to be around" and "a delightful person."

A check for $1 million from the estate of Juanita Spalding, Greensboro, was delivered at 5 p.m. yesterday. It is a partial distribution to allow the NC Zoo Society to acquire and protect land on behalf of its resident wildlife.

The wonderful, late donor described her intent to Zoo Director David Jones and me about a decade ago in her modest apartment near the Greensboro Arboretum.

In Chatham County, an open-source pioneer attempts to subvert the music industry's dominant paradigm:

Most of the building’s dimensions are based on the Fibonacci sequence and/or the golden ratio, with all the grids of the floors, walls and ceilings lined up to interlock and intersect with perfect symmetry. The wooden floor of the main studio is composed of a diamond pattern, and each diamond has 12 slats in honor of the 12-note scale of Western music...

...are there enough projects like that out there to support a studio that cost millions to build? Tiemann is convinced there is, citing parallels with the slow-food movement.

..."There is a new economy waiting to be discovered, new markets waiting to be engaged. We’re very early in addressing this brave new market, and doing so at a time when the record industry’s rhetoric is so wildly against anything new that it makes us look like the crazy ones."

The rush to get a bond item on the ballot this year for a such a center downtown or at the Greensboro Coliseum — or somewhere — seems hastily conceived and ambiguous. It reminds me of my days as a kid playing sandlot football and drawing plays in the dirt (“Everybody go long!)”

...Has anyone done any kind of business plan? How would the facility mesh with existing arts venues such as the Carolina Theater? What kinds of performers would it attract?

...It also would be helpful if there were some sort of master plan for sports and cultural arts venues that helped to determine what should go downtown, to the coliseum and elsewhere.

Tea leaves spilled after AJ filed his column indicate some measure of support from the Carolina Theatre crowd, but that situation needs to be defined more clearly, and all those other questions need answers long before this project earns a spot on the November ballot.

Jan 28, 2012

The former editor of the Daily News and the Record, who died this morning, was a role model for generations of journalists. I'm told Ed Yoder will speak at his funeral on Monday at First Pres.

Allen's piece captures something essential about Bill -- his generosity. He had brains and talent and courage, and the way he engaged people made them feel that maybe they possessed some measure of those qualities, too.

To say that Bill and his wife, Flo, who survives him, embodied Southern graciousness is true, but it should not obscure the fact that they were usually the most entertaining people in the room.

Allen: "I am blessed to have known him and to have been able to call him my friend." Amen.

Apparently so. People seem to really like the chain. So, for the sake of argument, let's all agree that TJ is swell and we should have one here.

But that doesn't make the case for extending the commercial footprint out Friendly and paving more shopping-center space in a city where empty buildings are treated as disposable items.

This LTE plays the We Like Trader Joe's card, and then doubles down on the non sequiturs by saying that people living happily near a very different sort of development prove that people living near the proposed shopping center have nothing to worry about.

A roundup of reactions to the downtown performing arts center plan, including the minor detail that there is no plan.

Ed Wolverton mentions that land would not have to be purchased if city-owned land is used. Not sure if I've mentioned this or not, but the city owns seven empty acres at South Elm and Lee, which would be a prime location for this kind of facility.

Also interesting: Carolina Theatre CEO Keith Holliday is quoted, which makes it seem that he's not opposed to a new PAC. That jibes with what I've heard from Carolina supporters.

My question: Why rush this thing onto the November ballot? Why not take the time to develop a great plan, line up some private funding, and launch the campaign when the economy is further into recovery?

Jan 27, 2012

The biggest problem with HPU is the school's educational philosophy: the buyer is always right. Students and their wealthy parents are catered to non-stop with a whirlwind of exciting activities in glamorous surroundings. There is pressure to inflate grades (frustrating for faculty) and even more pressure to overlook bad behavior outside of the classroom (frustrating for staff).

Anonymous reviews are problematic in more ways than one. Still, there is some consistency among these (claimed) experiences of (alleged) former High Point University workers.

Apparently North Carolina has an office called "Lieutenant Governor," and apparently this job is held by a person named "Walter Dalton," and apparently this person is now running for the Democratic nomination for Real Governor.

Pat McCrory [...] is going to make an announcement in Greensboro on Tuesday Jan. 31 (wonder what it could be) at 5:30 pm at the Shrine Club at 5010 High Point Rd., Greensboro. There will be refreshments and the opportunity to meet and talk to Pat. I would love to see all my FB friends there to make official his intentions."

Congress has exempted fracking from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act, leaving it largely to the states to police this industry. North Carolina, which has slashed the budget of its environmental agency by more than a third, will be hard-pressed to provide adequate protection for the state’s waters and rural lands.

Jan 26, 2012

UPDATE 10:40PM: Not sure how clearly this came across on teevee, but the crowd intensity in the Dome tonight was almost Dookgameish, and both teams seemed really into it from the start. Definitely felt like a rivalry game. UNC is still the better team at this point and played to the level expected pre-season. Zeller ate his Wheaties. State is on the way back. /update

I'm repeating myself, as old people do, but when I was a lad the big basketball rivalry in this state was between UNC and State College, because both of those schools were national powerhouses at that time, while Dook was not diddly for much of the '70s.

Anyway, things are looking up in Raleigh, and that's good for the ACC, although of course I'm hoping things don't get too different tonight in Chapel Hill.

Some kind words for Mineshaft from Andrei Codrescu, who says the "quarterly review, edited by Everett Rand, is one of the best kept secrets of the magazine world. The covers are often by R. Crumb, and you'll find in its pages some of the most uncompromising artist/cartoonists and writers working today. Some of them: Aleksandar Zograf, Rika Deryckere, and many many more, from the U.S. and abroad."

Meanwhile: "Europe is confronting a descent into chaos and conflict. In America he predicts riots on the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties. The global economic system could even collapse altogether."

Jan 25, 2012

The Federal Reserve said on Wednesday that it was likely to raise interest rates at the end of 2014, but not until then, adding another 18 months to the expected duration of its most basic and longest-running response to the financial crisis.

On the bright side, these guys didn't recognize an imminent depression, so maybe they don't know from recoveries, either.

Thanks for the shout-outs to North Carolina in your SOTU speech last night.

We understand that you would very much like to win our state again come November!

But when you talk about reviving American manufacturing and say the same good things happening in Detroit "can happen in Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Raleigh," you're not really connecting with the home folks, you're just pandering.

North Carolinians know that Wake County (that's where Raleigh is located!) was not our traditional manufacturing heartland, nor was employment there anywhere near as hard-hit as in many other parts of the state. If "Greensboro" was too obscure a reference for a national audience, surely you could have made your point by saying "the North Carolina Piedmont" or some such sonorous phrase.

As the City begins considering a new performing arts facility, it should ponder the good advice involving transparency and due diligence in a recent letter from Robert Malekoff to the N&R.

My guess is that a downtown location will be more appealing to voters than the Coliseum complex. Having Matt Brown run the thing would be great, but a the first law of real estate says choosing the right spot is critical. The City-owned lots at South Elm and Lee strike me as strong contenders, but there may be several good sites in the ambit of walkability.

Timing is important. Rushing this thing into a still-stagnant economy would be fatal, and rightly so. Proponents should take their time in developing -- in public -- a meticulous planning and marketing campaign that explains where the money will come from and where it will go, and why we want to do this in the first place.

Jan 24, 2012

Student attendance at men’s basketball games has fallen consistently over the last five years, even dropping after Duke won its fourth national championship in 2010. This season, approximately 650 undergraduates have attended each game, 150 fewer than during the 2008-09 season. As a result, Duke Athletics has begun to sell an increasing number of general admission tickets in the student section on a regular basis.

The Caymans holdings and holdings in a Swiss bank account - which was closed in 2010 after an adviser decided it could be politically embarrassing to Romney - were reported on tax returns and were not vehicles to avoid taxes, the advisers said.

Whatever. I'm not sure there's a good way to spin Swiss bank accounts and offshore holdings in Caribbean tax havens.

[A] new era of unlimited political money is reshaping the rules of presidential politics and empowering individual donors to a degree unseen since before the Watergate scandals.

The wealth of a single couple has now leveled the playing field in two critical primary states...

Quite a relief to read in the Wall Street Journal opinion pages that this is not a problem -- that, in fact, complaints are part of a "war on political free speech" -- otherwise I might be getting a little worried.

"Candidly, those who count on quote 'Hollywood' for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who's going to stand up for them when their job is at stake," Dodd told Fox News. "Don't ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don't pay any attention to me when my job is at stake."

Yesterday's big article on Apple's manufacturing operations was interesting for many reasons, including this one:

The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

The Chinese plant got the job.

Also, this:

“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”